Website: FanDome

Interview With: Ricky Joshi

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?:

Karim Motani

What is your background and qualifications?

Director of Business Development at GMR*Works and Kaleidoscope (IPG Companies). Sourced and led IPG’s investment in Facebook.

What does your website do?

Team Social Networks, largest sports video site om Internet. Second most popular sports MySpace Applications (bigger than Citizen Sports)

How do you generate revenue?If through ads, what ad network do you use?:

Advertising, merchandising, and team driven Fantasy (future rollout)

How have your marketed your site?:

Organic. Have reached 500K unique visitors (look at our quantcast stats) in 4 months from almost nothing in August.

Are you profitable?

No

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?:

Incubated by Kaleidoscope as Angel.

Are You currently looking for funding?

Yes.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, php, MySQL

What is your favorite feature on your website?

Team Social Networks

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

Local communities will continue to grow.

Website: YouSport.com

Interview With: Willy Chataigner

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?

Ahmed Elbortoukaly, David Roser

What is your background and qualifications?

We have a very talented team with diverse horizons and skills

What does your website do?

YouSport is connecting people with a passion for soccer.

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

no revenue yet, YouSport has launched in beta beginning of August.

How have your marketed your site?

Social marketing and SEO

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

Self funded

Are You currently looking for funding?

Yes

What type(s) of technology do you use?

Open source, Php, MySql, Symfony

What is your favorite feature on your website?

The two new features that will be launched in a couple of weeks Otherwise I like the video and team manager features

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

The reference for sports social networking site.

Open Sports, started by the former founder of Sportsline.com Mike Levy, has launched into Public Beta.  We previously covered Open Sports when they first announced their funding.

At first look it looks to be a standard sports fan site and it looks like they got Sean Salisbury involved.  If we are choosing someone notable to partner with when launching our site we would probably would put Salisbury last on our list. 

This is what there About page says they are going to do:

• Read national and local stories from around the web
• Read and write insightful and entertaining blogs
• Stay up-to-date on teams and players
• Keep your friends and other sports fans informed by uploading videos, photos and stories
• Become friends with other registered members
• Participate in passionate discussions through commenting and forums
• Be entertained through engaging community programming experiences

It will be interesting to see if they can garner the amount of unique visitors a venture backed site needs to be successful.

Website: Stracka

Interview with: Chase Stracka, CMO

Is there more than one founder? If so, who are they?

Just one founder, Jim Stracka

What is your background and qualifications?

(Jim has): Over 20 years in technology

What does your website do?

It helps golfers connect and enjoy the game more.  It is a virtual clubhouse.

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

Ads, using various ad networks and direct selling

How have your marketed your site?

Various golf websites pgatour.com and pga.com

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

Self funded

Are You currently looking for funding?

No

What is your favorite feature on your website?

The Stracka Line: www.strackaline.com

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

Technology is fun, but sports are still mainly physical and mental.  Technology like Stracka.com is good for the game.  It will help people connect and play more golf.

Website: Prep Champs

Interview With: Dean Bundschu

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?

Dean Bundschu, Founder & CEO. Co-founder of InTheNumbers; Orion Int’l; US Army Officer; BS ONU

Hal Fisher, Founder & Dir. Marketing. Founder of MilitaryStars, largest US Military Career Fair Company in US; serial entrepreneur & marketing expert

Jay Kerr, Founder & Dir. of Strategy. Consultant for Northrop Grumman, Titan, Deloitte, PepsiCo. Air Force Officer; MBA

Bryan Minihan, CTO. CTO, SpeedGreetings.com; extensive web apps dev at Accenture, GSK, The Nature Company

Gary Hayes – CFO: 30 year veteran software and technology services CFO (DCS, F-   Origin, Ateb, Koz.com, SAGA)

What is your background and qualifications?

Prior to founding PrepChamps, Dean was a co-founder of InTheNumbers, a North Carolina based company providing foreclosure data to the real estate market.  He also worked for Orion International, a recruiting and consulting firm, where he was consistently a top performer, responsible for Fortune 1000 Companies.  Prior to venturing into the business world, Dean served for 6 years as an Officer in the United States Army. This service included a combat tour in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he commanded a 120+ soldier HQ Company. Dean’s highly effective sales and marketing skills, corporate business experience and leadership ability complement his entrepreneurial interests.  Dean attended Ohio Northern University on a full ROTC scholarship where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science.

What does your website do?

PrepChamps (PC) combines sports, video, media, social communications and real-time events to build communities around high school athletes, coaches, fans, parents, their sports, communities and institutions.  The platform enables athletes to create player profiles, upload highlight films and statistics; creating a viewable, searchable and shareable database for college recruiters and fans alike. College recruiters benefit from centralized recruiting workflow/tools – connecting with, tracking, and verifying eligibility for prospective recruits, through platform and via offline events.  PC model is able to generate scalable multi-channel recurring revenue through advertising, events, online subscriptions, mobile and retail within a $2.1 billion high school recruiting market. PC hosts off-line high school athletic combines & tournaments, has structured successful partnerships with Reebok/Driven Athletics, D1 Sports, Five-Star Basketball and Wazoo Sports.  Aggressive marketing strategy has produced solid ROI and very low CPA has allowed PC to grow very rapidly.  Offline partnerships provide barriers to entry, strong branding and additional revenue streams. Currently projecting 125,000 monthly uniques and 30,000 registered users by July to grow content and revenue.

How have your marketed your site?

PrepChamps believes that activity breeds activity, so we are simultaneously initiating numerous Internet marketing campaigns, targeting and leveraging the power of social platforms like Facebook, MyYearbook, eSpin and MySpace to drive a high volume of users to our site.  Our web-based marketing plan is based on Five core strategies: CPA Direct
Advertising, Website Optimization, Affiliate Programs, User-Based Viral Marketing, and Permission-Based Email Marketing.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

PrepChamps was funded with a total investment of $150,000 by the founders.  The company recently raised a total of $1,200,000 in seed funding.

Are You currently looking for funding?

Yes.  Currently in the process of large Series B equity-based capital raise.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

PrepChamps initial Beta test platform was completed in July 2007, and the 2.0 version was launched in early March, 2008.  The full production application leverages Ruby on Rails on a Linux/MySQL platform to deliver fully-tested, scalable components and features designed for high-capacity, load-balanced, fault-tolerant social networking capabilities.  The video delivery system leverages Amazon Simple Storage Solutions to offload high-volume, lengthy video uploads and viewing from the core application.  The core application delivers custom features in small widgets on each page to the four primary user-types (Athletes, Coaches, Fans and Visitors), as well as site-wide capabilities across the platform, including blogs, forums, search, favorites, messaging, etc.

What is your favorite feature on your website?

NCAA Clearing House Checklist

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

Websites that rely exclusively on a advertisement based revenue model will have to adapt to a changing environment or fail.  Advertising is moving from a CPM basis to a CPC and eventually to a lead generation model.  Therefore websites will need to effectively mine behavioral based data within their platform in order to effectively provide targeted advertising to their users.  This type of advertising will need to add to the user experience, rather than clutter the experience.

Websites that can aggregate content on a local or better yet a hyper-local level will be able to succeed within this changing environment.  Very few sites can generate sufficient adverting revenue within a short period of time.  The days where you could command a high valuation based on website traffic are numbered.  Internet companies that can find various ways to monetize their communities will be a lot more successful than ad driven models.

Website:  Sports Mates

Interview With:  Blair Cummins

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?

There are two founders: Richard Austin and myself.

What are your backgrounds and qualifications?

Both Richard and I have been involved with online sports media for a number of years. We were retained by Terra Lycos in 2001 to build the official website of Anna Kournikova and have worked on projects for clients such as Nike/Manchester United and SFX Sports.

Richard was one of the founders of WTAWorld.com (now TennisForum.com) and MensTennisForums.com, the two largest online professional tennis fan communities in the world, and was also hired as a consultant to Rivals.com in its first incarnation to help develop its tennis content channel.

Our full bios are available at http://www.sportsmatesinc.com/about/management.

What does your website do?

SportsMates is a social networking service that is focused on connecting sports fans around their favorite sports, leagues, teams and players. Our social networking platform has the following features:

- Member profiles.
- Internal email.
- Message boards.
- Photo galleries.
- Clubs (including user-created clubs).
- Blog aggregation.
- Link directories.
- Search.
- Live chat.

How have your marketed your site?

We have not engaged in much “traditional” marketing. Instead, we have chosen to recruit or acquire existing online sports communities or properties and to migrate their communities onto SportsMates.

For instance, InfiernoRojo.com is one of the most popular fan sites for the Independiente soccer club in Argentina. When we launched PorDeporte (http://www.pordeporte.com/), our Spanish-language sports social network, we arranged for their 19,000+ member community to move to PorDeporte (http://clubs.pordeporte.com/infiernorojo).

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

We generate revenue in three ways:

1. The sale of advertising and sponsorships. Example: K-Swiss is the lead sponsor of Kournikova.com and its community on SportsMates (http://clubs.sportsmates.com/kournikova).

2. Services. Example: We host Gillette’s official community for the Gillette Young Guns NASCAR drivers on SportsMates (http://clubs.sportsmates.com/gilletteyoungguns).

3. We are in the process of finalizing agreements to handle advertising sales and business development for other online sports properties/communities.

In everything we do, our primary goal is to connect advertisers, sponsors and other sports industry players with fans in ways that are meaningful to all parties.

We use Google AdSense in some places and are preparing to fill remnant inventory with ads from one or more ad networks but thus far, we are most interested in dealing directly with advertisers and sponsors so that we can develop campaigns that go beyond the traditional CPM/CPC models.

Funding?

We have been primarily self-funded but did take a small amount of funding from the company’s outside director more than a year ago.

Are you currently looking for funding?

We are currently exploring the possibility of raising capital.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

SportsMates is built on a proprietary social networking platform that we developed from scratch. It is built on PHP and PostgreSQL and we’re using open-source technologies like memcached for performance and scaling.

What is your favorite feature on your website?

The message boards. We became involved with sports media back when the message board was the “social network” and message board communities are still one of the most popular ways sports fans connect and communicate online.

Because of this, we have made a considerable effort to make sure that our message board functionality is second-to-none. You can see the level of customization that we permit on some of the communities I linked to above.

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

While I wouldn’t call this a bold prediction, I would note that the business of sport, like so many industries, is going through considerable change. Markets are fragmented and fans are often more difficult to reach and retain. I believe that companies who understand this and who can successfully help entities in the sports industry leverage technology to deal with these changes have the best opportunity for success.

Website: Fanboom

Interview With: Thomas Caporaso

What is your background and qualifications?

I am a seasoned online marketer with loyalty, continuity, subscription and membership experience.  My specialties include online member generation, product development, SEM/SEO, e-commerce, and new partner generation.  I have built programs for many leading brands like AIG, Victoria’s Secret, AAA, Citibank and AOL to help them either acquire, retain, or monetize their customer base.

I am also a passionate sports fan and follow many different teams and sports

What does your website do?

FanBoom puts the power of sports information in your hands. At FanBoom you can track all of your favorite teams, and writers (national and local), read the best of the sports blogs, and interact with robust community of fans of your favorite teams. Our goal is to build a portal of sports information that serve up Your Sports, Your Way, so you won’t have to go anywhere else.

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

Our site currently generates revenue through ads.  We recently signed a deal to be in the Burst Media network.  We are also working with other solo sponsors.

How have your marketed your site?

We have created a blog network (blogs.FanBoom.com) that currently has six different sports (basketball, baseball, football, soccer, nascar, and hockey).  We also posts many of our articles to the large sports focused blog networks.  Many of these posts have generated significant organic traffic for us. Killerstartups.com also did a great review of our site.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

We recently received a very small round of Angel investment

Are you currently looking for funding?

We are currently looking to help fund our marketing plans.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

Ruby on Rails

What is your favorite feature on your website?

My Boom – a very easy point and click menu that allows you to pick your sports and team so you only get the news related to the teams that you want to read about each day.

If you ran Espn, Cbssports, Cnnsi, etc, besides your website what sports website would you acquire?

I would focus on the team specific blogs that are written by passionate fans.  One of our strategies is to build out our blog network by working with these team specific blogs.  We like the angle that a passionate fan writes from which ultimately drives comments and feedback from people who read it. 

That back and forth discussion is what sports is all about.

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

Yes – sports news and information will be completely managed by the consumer.  Sports fans don’t want to be spoon fed lots of irrelevant content, they want to have a deep and wide view of the teams that they follow.  We plan to be at the forefront of that conversion and completely hand over the keys to that content to the consumer who can do with it what they want.

Website: UFN

Name: Jonathan Joseph

When did you launch Ultimate Fotball Network?

The Ultimate Football Network is still pre-launch.

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?

I’m the only founder.

What is your background and qualifications?

I’m a former venture capital investor and social media consultant. 

What does your website do?

The Ultimate Football Network (UFN) is a free social media resource for the Fantasy Football market or for casual fans looking for the hottest news about their favorite teams. UFN aggregates, organizes and ranks football content making it easily accessible and customizable for football fans. Fans can add, rate and comment on the content in the UFN news stream. The Ultimate Football Network automatically tags content with the teams and players mentioned, giving users the option of filtering the content to find the hottest news about any team or player with one click. So when users are trying to figure out whether to start or bench a particular player on their fantasy roster, they can quickly find the hottest news about that player whether it comes from ESPN or a fan’s personal blog or a fan discussion thread on a message board.

The Ultimate Football Network also organizes the social media landscape by tracking data about social media content. Based on fan feedback and participation, we track which authors and sources produce good content, which fans add valuable content and commentary and which fans know about certain teams and players. We’re working on building out additional features that make this content and data more useful to fans looking to use UFN to manage their fantasy rosters.

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

For now, UFN generates revenue through advertising and we use Adbrite. Going forward, we will have a different strategy with respect to advertising and other non-advertising revenue streams coming from features under development.

How have your marketed your site?

We haven’t done any marketing yet as we are pre-launch.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

Self funded to date

Are You currently looking for funding?

We’re talking to some angels at the moment.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

Ruby on Rails and Postgres

What is your favorite feature on your website?

My favorite feature is definitely the ability to rank fans and authors. When there are enough users voting on content, I’m really excited to see which authors fans will think are the best. For example, I’m looking forward to seeing whether fans think the guys at ESPN (John Clayton, Len Pasqaurelli, etc) do better work than the guys at CNNSI (Peter King, Don Banks, etc) and I’m wondering who will be the first “fan” to break through to stardom using UFN. It would be a great story if an independent blogger ended up getting hired somewhere like ESPN because his blog consistently got more votes than say, John Clayton.

If you ran a large sports network like ESPN or CBS, besides your website what indpendent website would you acquire first and why?

Not an easy question to answer. Even though ESPN and Yahoo, in particular, have done a pretty good job with their online sports properties to date, the world of media (and not just sports media) is going to undergo such a dramatic shift that they will all have to make major moves. There are a handful of “startups” in the sports 2.0 space but I don’t know that I think any of them have gotten it right so far. In fact, a few that have emerged so far as early “leaders” have, in my mind, huge, fatal flaws in their business models so I think everything is wide open for start-ups at this point.

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

I have bold predictions for what technology is going to do to almost every business in existence, so yes I think the sports world will also get turned upside down over the next 10 years. All sorts of industries are trying to figure out how to incorporate the “social” trend but no industry has a more natural affinity for social trends and user engagement than sports, so yes there will be big changes on the horizon. I was amused recently at the brouhaha over the Bob Costas Live panel on the future of Sports media (see the UFN blog for my complete thoughts). For what was supposed to be a panel of experts, it was abundantly clear that none of them had even a basic understanding of the changing landscape, so it’s clear we’ re still in the first inning of the game here.

Via Techcrunch Citizen Sports is teaming up with Sports Ilustrated to develop Facebook Apps devoted to sports enthusiasts.  The apps will include stat tracking, live draft capabilites, and other features that fantasy players use.  Originally the group who created Pro Trade is now Citizen Sports and Pro Trade is one of the companies underneath Citizen Sports.  Pro Trade is basically a stock market for sports players based on fantasy stats.

Citizen Sports is led by Jeff Ma who was one of the original MIT blacjack players that inspired the book Bringing Down the House and Mike Kearns. 

It is really interesting that Citizen Sports has moved away its focus from Pro Trade.  Landing the deal with Sports Illustrated was probably key in orchestrating the new company which will devote a lot of its time towards Facebook apps.  With fantasy sports being such an interactive experience we find it hard to believe that a facebook app would be how people compete.  We see destination websites being much better at fantasy sports.  They are probably more likely to attract the passive fantasy player.

According to TechCrunch, Yardbarker which is basically turning into one of the largest independent sports social networks on the internet received 6 million in funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and includes investors Russ Siegelman, Ronnie Lott, Jarl Mohn, Labrador Ventures, and Baseline Ventures. 

This should give adverstisers in their network a good boost as they will probably be able to higher more sales people to sell their ads.  They have done a great job of acquiring new general blogs and athlete blogs.  They have also done a great job providing value to their blogs in the network.  It will be interesting to see if they can keep doing this once they have to worry about making a profit.